The Hammer Swings

I think the first mistake was in storing live rounds in the same igloo with training rounds. From there on the errors just proliferated.

All those involved should be hammered and rightly so For once in the modern Air Force officers who are involved will be dealt with harshly.
Back in my early career when SAC still was taking care of business before the fighter mafia and ACC screwed everything up, nuclear weapons security and transport was deadly serious. I remember an incident at Mather when the lead alert aircraft on an elephant walk failed to negotiate the turn off on the end of the runway and ended up stuck on the overrun for about 45 minutes with the entire alert force backed up behind it. While we were waiting for maintenance to get the A/C clear the SAC Wing Commander was out on the taxiway in his staff car, I swear I saw his career light winking out that day. Within hours after the Alert Force was secured a C-135 landed from Offutt, within days the Wing king and ops commander were gone and numerous other individuals were given new jobs.

Checklists have a purpose -- apparently someone did not follow his (or her) checklist. Or worse, several people did not use their checklists.

When handling nuclear weapons you do not rely on memory or experience -- use the checklist.

And what happened to the two-man policy concerning nuclear weapons? If each were doing his job, a mistake by the other would be caught.

It's a good thing LeMay is not in command; I suspect he would have ordered summary executions.

Gunsite's Safety Rule Number 1 works just as well for cruise missiles as for .45s, I suppose.

I'm just tired of reporting that imagines all kinds of fantastic things happening and then reports that as likely. Yes, theft could have happened, but everything else they came up with was absolute nonsense.

"...but the lapses could theoretically have led to warheads being stolen or damaged in a way that could have disseminated toxic nuclear materials."

Let's see: misuse "toxic" when "radioactive" is intended, check, aware of cluelessness and covers it with weasel word "theoretically", check, thinks that warheads are held together with bubblegum and 100 mph tape and can thus pop open spontaneously, check, doesn't realize that "nuclear material" means protons and neutrons, check, and finally, thinks that bombs are filled with green goo that can be "disseminated" if they spontaneously pop open, check.

That's on top of the fact that they had to interview officials to know they weren't going to spontaneously detonate.

for years the nukes have had this habit of shipping "dummy" packages around that can only be told from the real thing by checking serial numbers against the master list.

supposedly this is to catch bad fellows who have no business with these things etc.

i have a feeling that this happening is an offshoot of this practice and bit the wrong guys.

ultimately the guys in the higher paygrades still have the responsibility of where, how, who and when.

C

Things like this did not happen when I was in the AF!lol
Billmil, you are right! In the SAC days heads would roll and carrers would end in a bad way.
When I was a weapons loader in SAC we had a saying, "To error is human to forgive is devine, neither of which is SAC's policy!"